With digital photography, engineers and color scientists made the appearance model of digital imagery to try to emulate WYSISWYG. And they did a great job.

The captors themselves don’t see an image even close to how it looks after being processed. What you see on screen is an abstraction as it passes through many steps, many states of image building, by running the document through a processor. The good news is that, for those who shoot raw, having a digital negative is an opportunity—a playground for you to find your unique vision and bring it to life.

When film was the only support for photography for the masses, the film had an inherent bias to it in terms of color, density, grain character, etc. Even if shot and processed without straying from the recommended process, it still had a “look”.

That look, however, was only expressing a single preference—an attempt to represent a pleasing color, similar to that seen by the eyes and imagined in the mind.